Fred Luthans

University of Nebraska–Lincoln | NU · Department of Management

COVID-19 is altering the world, impacting every facet of life, and driving an associated global paradigm shift. Threats to our individual, family, team, community, and global well-being consume our attention at the potential price of our well-being and performance. The time to respond with scientific approaches to protect our most precious assets –...

The major purpose of this article is to provide valuable insights and specific guidelines into how the now established “Positive Psychological Capital” or simply PsyCap can help prevent, treat, and sustainably recover from the current mental health global challenges. Specifically, we propose and demonstrate how PsyCap can play a realistic alternati...

The purpose of this study is to investigate how goal orientations and self-efficacy, as predictor variables, impact an individual player's performance in a First-Person Shooter (FPS) game. Online surveys were completed by 134 individuals who had played one of the pre-selected FPS games. A significant relationship between learning goal orientation (...

The spread of digital communication technology has enabled office workers to perform many tasks at remote locations such as at home, in cafes, and in shared offices. However, remote workers are likely to feel anxious about the decline in their trust with colleagues and the loss of opportunities to obtain important information. Employee well-being i...

We propose the recently introduced implicit measure of psychological capital (PsyCap), the Implicit Psychological Capital Questionnaire (I-PCQ; Harms & Luthans, 2012), can provide a needed valid alternative to the self-report Psychological Capital Questionnaire (PCQ). We explain the development of the I-PCQ items, assess the structural validity of...

Purpose Psychological Capital (PsyCap), consisting of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, is a positive state associated with attitudes, behaviors and performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a dynamic mediational model posing work engagement as the mediator of the longitudinal relation between PsyCap and job performance. De...

I will be making some highly personalized comments on the Aguinis et al. (2017) focal article concerning rigor versus relevance, renaming/rebranding industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, and I-O psychology versus business school organizational behavior (OB). Before commenting, however, I feel compelled to briefly frame my remarks from the...

It is difficult to conceive of a society populated with people who are completely unmoved by the respect, approval, and reproof of others.

The now recognized core construct of psychological capital, or simply PsyCap, draws from positive psychology in general and positive organizational behavior (POB) in particular. The first-order positive psychological resources that make up PsyCap include hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, or the HERO within. These four best meet the inclusio...

This book examines the range of new theories, research, and applications in the most generative areas of positive psychology, at the dawn of a new wave of positive psychology scholarship—one that is increasingly sensitive to real-world issues, adversity, culture, and context. In the 17 years since the inception of the movement, the field of positiv...

As positive psychology moves into the workplace, researchers have been able to demonstrate the desirable impact of positive organizational behavior. Specifically, psychological capital (PsyCap) improves employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance. Advancing PsyCap in sales research is important given the need for a comprehensive positive approac...

In this set of studies, we conduct an initial validation of the Implicit Psychological Capital Questionnaire-Health (IPCQ-H), a short, easy to administer and score measure of psychological capital designed to reflect implicit schemas or cognitions surrounding one's health. The results of two studies demonstrate that the implicit measure of IPCQ-H i...

Over the years, both management practitioners and academics have generally assumed that positive workplaces lead to desired outcomes. Unlike psychology, considerable attention has also been devoted to the study of positive topics such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. However, to place a scientifically based focus on the role that...

Workplace resilience is a necessity for organizations and employees given it assists them in overcoming adversity and ultimately succeeding. However, organizational scholars have largely overlooked this construct. In this Incubator, we briefly summarize extant research on workplace resilience to highlight opportunities for theory building and advan...

Psychological capital;Physical health;Psychological well-being

This chapter is mostly concerned with social or informal recognition. The focus of the chapter is that providing recognition leads to performance improvement. The effect of positive reinforcement, contingently applied, on performance improvement may be one of the most agreed upon principles in the field of organizational behavior, and arguably psyc...

The purpose of this document is to provide a systematic review of the literature characterizing the well-being-performance relationship in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments. This report also examines temporal effects on well-being and stress/negative psychosocial functioning over the duration of ICE missions. In doing so, this repo...

This report is intended to satisfy the requirements of solicitation NNJ13487837QA: “Individual Growth and Resilience”. This report is presented in two parts: a review of existing literature and an operational assessment of resilience specifically in the context of long-duration spaceflight. The literature review begins with a description of the con...

The rigor-relevance gap in management research has been hotly debated and contested for more than half a century. Despite the hundreds of scholarly articles dedicated to the topic, however, empirical examination has been surprisingly rare. The empirical analysis reported here bolster prior empirical evidence by improving upon prior methodologies by...

This study tested the two-way influence of leaders and follower teams through relationships between leaders’ psychological capital (PsyCap) and follower teams’ PsyCap, and in turn towards each other’s work engagement. We drew from crossover and broaden and build theories and related research to formulate hypotheses concerning how leaders’ and their...

Over the years, the management field has had many important contributors to its theoretical development and practical application of its major concepts. As a relatively young academic discipline, the management field has the good fortune to have access to many of those pioneers who are responsible for its foundation, history, and evolution. Many of...

This study aims at reversing the lens of the performance equation in psychological capital research. Specifically, we tested a cross-level model of how team performance impacts team members’ individual-level PsyCap through two forms of team leaders’ responses to team performance - negative feedback and developmental support. We also explored if lea...

With employee creativity becoming increasingly critical to the competitiveness of today's organisations, there is a need to better understand and refine the role that positive psychological constructs such as learning goal orientation (LGO) and the now recognised psychological capital (PsyCap) may play in influencing creativity. In this study (N =...

In today's highly competitive and extremely complex global economy, organizational leaders at all levels are facing unprecedented challenges. Yet, some seem to be handling the pressure better than others. Utilizing 4 samples of CEOs/presidents/top (n = 205), middle (n = 183), and junior (n = 202) managers, as well as 107 entrepreneurs, using Struct...

Thriving at work is a positive psychological state characterized jointly by learning and vitality. Conventional wisdom and some initial research indicate that such thriving benefits both employees themselves and their organizations. This study specifically tests thriving at work by linking it to a theoretically important personal outcome variable (...

The full force of globalization has hit today's organizations, and it is clear that there are many cultural and human problems. International human resource management (IHRM) is being asked to better understand and develop multinational organizational leaders to meet the challenges. A prominent solution that is receiving increased attention is the...

Authentic leadership has received considerable attention and research support over the past decade. Now the time has come to refine and better understand how it impacts performance. This study investigates the moderating role followers' positive psychological capital (PsyCap) and the mediating role that leader–member exchange (LMX) may play in infl...

In keeping with this goal of a “more realistic and balanced view,” in this chapter we explore positive psychological capital or PsyCap and ethical behaviors and outcomes as orthogonal (mutually independent). Although both PsyCap and ethical behaviors are generally regarded as “good” for people and for organizations, we propose that the two may be i...

Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners from South Africa were imprisoned on notorious Robben Island from the mid-1960s until the end of the apartheid regime in 1991. The stark conditions and abusive treatment of these prisoners has been widely publicized. However, upon reflection and in retrospect, over the years, a type of metamorphosis occu...

Kotlar and De Massis found that membership assortment and the number of organizational members, as well as the imminence of succession, influence goal diversity in family firms. They also showed that goal diversity can be managed and family-centered goals can be stabilized through professional and familial social interactions, driving the formation...

Many people, especially organizational leaders, find today’s environment both depressing and overwhelming. The depressing part is the seemingly uncontrollable downward spirals of negativity. For example, put yourself in the shoes of Dawn Hochsprung, principal of Sandy Hook Elementary in New-town, Connecticut. How could any leader stay level-headed...

A key assumption of effective international human resource management (IHRM) is that global leaders influence and serve as role models for their followers, regardless of the inherent distance (physical and frequency of interaction) between them in today's global context or the quality of the relationship. Although considerable attention has been de...

Purpose – This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article. Design/methodology/approach – The es...

This paper traces and acknowledges the heretofore generally overlooked contributions that anthropology and anthropologists have made to the history of management thought. Particular attention is devoted to tracing the early anthropological roots, highlighting the contributions made to the Hawthorne studies, and featuring the work of William Foote W...

The conventional wisdom that “happy workers are productive workers” goes back to the beginning of the field of organizational behavior and human resource management. However, there has generally been a lack of rich theoretical development and supporting empirical research testing this hypothesis until the stimulation provided by the positive psycho...

Increasing recognition is being given to the role that employee overall well-being plays in desired outcomes of today’s organizations. To help organizational leaders searching for understanding and answers, we propose that the positive core construct of psychological capital (or simply PsyCap), consisting of the positive psychological resources of...

Positive organizational scholars define positivity as “elevating processes and outcomes” (Cameron & Caza, 2004, p. 731). Thus, a better understanding of positive processes requires the investigation of the explanatory mechanisms that can account for the manifestation of “intentional behaviors that depart from the norm of a reference group in honora...

In the wake of increasing globalization, today's organizational leaders are faced with unprecedented complexity. To help meeting the challenge, this article proposes a new positive approach to global leadership. After first providing the background on positivity, positive global leadership is carefully defined and its similarities and differences w...

Implicit psychological constructs are effective predictors of behavioral outcomes but are rarely used in organizational settings because of real or imagined problems with measurement validity and administration. To address these concerns, we present a means of assessing implicit constructs quickly and easily by using psychological capital as an exa...

Although the value of positivity has always been recognized, only in the past decade has there been renewed interest and a refocus in both psychology as a whole and in organizational studies. This chapter summarizes the theory-building and research findings to date on positive organizational behavior (POB) and psychological capital (PsyCap). The ch...

This study drew from two distinct paradigms: the social cognitively based emerging field of positive organizational behavior or POB and the more established behaviorally based area of organizational behavior modification or OB Mod. The intent was to show that both can contribute to complex challenges facing today's organizations. Using a quasi-expe...

The positive core construct of psychological capital (or simply PsyCap), consisting of the psychological resources of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, has recently been demonstrated to be open to human resource development (HRD) and performance management. The research stream on PsyCap has now grown to the point that a quantitative summary...

The positive core construct of psychological capital (consisting of efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) has been conceptually and empirically demonstrated to be related to employee performance. However, much of this work has relied on cross-sectional designs to examine these relationships. This study utilizes longitudinal data from a large fi...

This field experimental study examined the role that positive leadership plays in producing effective leader and follower outcomes. Specifically, a sample of engineers (N = 106) from a very large aerospace firm were randomly assigned to four experimental conditions. Two conditions involved assigning these engineers to a low and high problem complex...

Despite considerable attention to the creative process and its relationship with personal characteristics, there is no published study focused directly on the relationship between the recently recognized core construct of psychological capital (PsyCap) and creative performance. Drawing from a large (N = 899) and heterogeneous sample of working adul...

Both conventional understanding and positive psychology recognise an important link between people's character strengths and how they perform their jobs. However, no research to date has focused on the relationship of employees' wisdom strengths, potential mediating effects and creative task performance. Utilising a large heterogeneous sample (N =...

This chapter begins with an assessment of where we are with the theory, research, and application of positivity in the workplace in general and positive organizational behavior (POB)/ psychological capital (PsyCap) in particular. Special attention is initially given to the traditional role of positivity in organizational research. It then presents...

Although there have been recent theoretical advances in what is increasingly being recognized as authentic leadership, research testing possible mediating processes and the impact on group-level outcomes has not received attention. To help address this need, this study examined at the group level of analysis the role that collective psychological c...

Recently, theory and research have supported psychological capital (PsyCap) as an emerging core construct linked to positive outcomes at the individual and organizational level. However, to date, little attention has been given to PsyCap development through training interventions; nor have there been attempts to determine empirically if such PsyCap...

A critical challenge facing today's organizational leaders is gaining their followers' trust and having them view leaders as effective in addressing turmoil and change. Using a downsizing scenario as the context, this field experiment examined how a leader's positivity and transparency impacted followers' perceived trust, defined in terms of willin...

Conventional wisdom and recent research have supported the importance of employee positivity. However, empirical analysis has not yet demonstrated potential added value of recently recognized psychological capital over the more established positive traits in predicting work attitudes and behaviors. This study found that psychological capital was po...

Taking positive psychology to the workplace, a core construct of psychological capital or PsyCap (consisting of efficacy, hope, optimism, and resiliency) has recently received considerable attention. After summarizing this literature, the chapter is mainly devoted to presenting an integrated model of PsyCap to meet the challenges of further develop...

The recently recognized core construct of psychological capital or PsyCap (consisting of the positive psychological resources of efficacy, hope, optimism, and resilience) has been demonstrated to be related to various employee attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes. However, to date, the impact of this positive core construct over time a...

Workplace stress is a growing concern for human resource managers. Although considerable scholarly and practical attention has been devoted to stress management over the years, the time has come for new perspectives and research. Drawing from the emerging field of positive organizational behavior, this study offers research findings with implicatio...

ParagonsPeacePenn Resiliency ProgramPerseverancePersonal Growth InitiativePersonal ResponsibilityPersonalityPerson-Environment FitPeterson, ChristopherPhysical HealthPlayPleasurePositive AffectivityPositive EmotionsPositive EthicsPositive ExperiencesPositive IllusionsPositive Law and PolicyPositive Organizational BehaviorPositive Organizational Sch...

Viewing psychological ownership as a positive resource for impacting human performance in organizations, the present study investigated the components of an expanded view of psychological ownership. Confirmatory factor analyses on a proposed measure of psychological ownership provided support for a positively-oriented, “promotion-focused” aspect of...

Perhaps the most important “Point” we would like to make in this “Point-Counterpoint” on positive organizational behavior is the role that research must play in this evolving area of study. We follow this point on the importance of research by drawing from recent findings that indicate in discussions such as this point and counterpoint, that taking...

In this rejoinder to Hackman's counterpoint piece on positive organizational behavior (POB), we again take a positive, inquiry approach. We address and build out each of his identified potential perils with the aim of accelerating the journey of POB understanding, research, and application. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As organizations seek to improve competitive advantage and promote high performance work practices, the human capital component of the productivity equation is receiving increasing recognition (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Cavanaugh & Noe, 1999; Delaney & Huselid, 1996; Ling & Jaw, 2006; Ulrich, 1997). Both ac- ademics and practitioners now emphasize the...

The concept of leader efficacy has received relatively little attention in the leadership literature. This is somewhat surprising given that effective leadership requires high levels of agency (i.e., deliberately or intentionally exerting positive influence) and confidence. This review uses existing theory and research on leader efficacy as a point...

Psychological Capital is introduced as an important asset that can be leveraged to enhance the virtuousness of organizations. Psychological capital is defined as a state of development characterized by self-efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience, though there are many other similar resources. The authors examine empirical studies showing promise t...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine whether the use of money, social recognition, and feedback have a similar impact on employee performance in the context of a modern Korean broadband internet service firm. Design/methodology/approach – The study design was a quasi-field experiment (with control group). First, the leaders of this Kor...

After defining and providing the current status of psychological capital (PsyCap), we address the need to better understand its stability (i.e., state vs. trait). Specifically, we issue a call for longitudinal research. The balance of this “incubator” article examines the relevance, potential obstacles, and advantages of this design in meeting PsyC...

Psychological capital with components of hope, self-efficacy, optimism, and resiliency has recently emerged as a core construct in taking positive psychology to the workplace. A distinguishing feature is that it is "state-like" and thus open to development. We analyze whether such psychological capital can be developed through a highly focused, 2-h...

As China continues its unprecedented economic growth and emergence as a world power, new solutions must be forthcoming to meet the accompanying challenges. We propose a positive approach to Chinese HRM that recognizes, develops and manages the psychological capital (PsyCap) of workers. After providing a brief overview of hope, efficacy, optimism, r...

Although much attention has been devoted to understanding employee resistance to change, relatively little research examines the impact that positive employees can have on organizational change. To help fill this need, the authors investigate whether a process of employees' positivity will have an impact on relevant attitudes and behaviors. Specifi...

Although the value of a supportive organizational climate has been recognized over the years, there is a need for better understanding of its relationship with employee outcomes. This study investigates whether the recently emerging core construct of positive psychological capital (consisting of hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy) plays a rol...

This article examines positive organizational behavior in the work environment. Particular focus is given to the impact and effects of optimism, resilience and hope. The authors, implement the foundation of positive psychology and organizational behavior, investigate the impact of positive behavior on desired work-related outcomes, such as employee...

Inherent in the meaning of global mindset is the dilemma of an appropriate level of analysis at which we define, measure, and research this construct. This chapter addresses the individual level of analysis using social cognition, which explains how the development process of global mindset helps individuals make sense of unfamiliar stimuli, broade...

Two studies were conducted to analyze how hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy individually and as a composite higher-order factor predicted work performance and satisfaction. Results from Study 1 provided psychometric support for a new survey measure designed to assess each of these 4 facets, as well as a composite factor. Study 2 results indi...

Although the value of positivity has been assumed over the years, only recently has it become a major focus area for theory building, research, and application in psychology and now organizational behavior. This review article examines, in turn, selected representative positive traits (Big Five personality, core self-evaluations, and character stre...

Although the importance of diversity in organizations is widely recognized, diversity training is under attack. Drawing from self-efficacy theory and research, we developed a questionnaire to measure one's efficacy of successfully coping with widely recognized diversity initiatives. Then we conducted a study examining the effect of self-efficacy-ba...

Immigrant entrepreneurs have always played a critical role in the economies of countries around the world. Although considerable attention has been devoted to the importance of economic and financial capital, we examine three overlooked forms of capital that may enhance the success of immigrant entrepreneurs: human, social, and psychological capita...

This book draws from a foundation of positive psychology and recently emerging positive organizational behavior (POB). Its purpose is to introduce the untapped human resource capacity of psychological capital, or simply PsyCap. This PsyCap goes beyond traditionally recognized human and social capital and must meet the scientific criteria of theory,...

Psychological capital: Investing and developing positive organizational behavior Several years ago, a growing number of psychologists became concerned that the field had overemphasized the negative at the sacrifice of the positive. In seeking the illusive solutions of healing mental illness and dysfunctional behavior, both academic and practicing p...

In the aftermath of downsizing, it is becoming increasingly clear that organizations need a distinctive human resource core competency for sustained competitive advantage. Although there are many ways to develop such a competency, this article stresses the importance of multiple skill-building programs, “new pay” for performance (gainsharing, team...